Just Be Rich • Hacker News Board

Re: Just Be Rich

#861

Post by Joker_vD » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

nec4b wrote: post #821

Joker_vD wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pro-communist argument really is founded on two points: a) it's impossible for everyone to be a (successful) businessman: somebody has to be an employee and do the actual work, y'know? b) to be "actually rich" -- which is not just "being on the level of personally comfortable standard of living", it's more of "having certain level of personal influence" -- you have to own a share in a commercial enterprise and ge…

Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.

The most hilarious thing about "a few select and their families" being rich is that it's not even true. Having a roomish (1 room per person + a living ropm) flat, a car with the personal driver, a small villa, and access to "closed for others" food and clothing stores was pretty much the most one could achieve -- and non of those things could be bought by money. Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached to the position, you lose your place -- your successor gets them. Money simply could not buy one a lot: there was either nothing to buy, or the thing you wanted wasn't being sold.

And yeah, the common populace did object to the higher-ranking party members and bureaucrats having those privileges. One of the slogans of perestroika was "away with privileges", I kid you not -- people would rather elites be as poor as them. Well, the irony is palpable: thirty years later, the common populace is not much richer than it used to be (teachers used to be able to easily travel by plane on their wage, not anymore), but the top-level government officials are way, way better off than they used to be.

Re: Just Be Rich

#862

Post by gmadsen » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #841

gmadsen wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that hypothetical can't exist though, so what is the point in entertaining it. The world have finite resources, money (no matter the inflation) is a way to ration this to people. Not every single person can have a mansion in SF.

Not a mansion in SF, but a super computer in their pocket? Point being, only some resources are limited, but wealth in general is not.

the things that matter are. Land, housing, access to others labor. Natural resources.

Re: Just Be Rich

#863

Post by fraud » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #635

bkirkby wrote: post #561

As economist Russ Roberts often points out in these inequality discussions, the quintiles that are used to show growth only in the upper class does not refer to the same people over time. When you follow people over time, they generally move up into higher quintiles thus "getting richer." https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-g... He also talks about "what happened in 1972" is more about demograp…

You and Russ both need to take a look at [1]. Socioeconomic mobility has massively fallen in the US over time. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

I feel like there has to be a better way to portray class mobility than statistics like % out earning parents. It seems that (im not an economist) out earning parents is crude because it doesn’t take actually moving classes into consideration. Can one not out earn their parents and still be poor or have not moved classes?

Re: Just Be Rich

#864

Post by JohnPrine » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #717

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. So you're saying we need a 100% estate tax? Because the same applies to those lucky enough to be born into rich families.

As someone who generally agrees with the poster you're replying to, yes I would be in favor of a 100% estate tax

Re: Just Be Rich

#865

Post by enkid » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #763

enkid wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the Titanic sunk in 1912. Second, these are two events that happened around the same time. That does not mean they are at all related. Titanic primarily carried American and British passengers. The start of World War I primarily involved Austria, Serbia, Germany, and Russia. It's hard to see how British or American Millionaires would have influenced those events to stop the war.

Banking, at the level of being the financier of nations, was a global industry then as it is now. Many of those people at the time were British or American and a number of them died on that boat.

How does having extra bankers stop someone from assassinating an archduke, Austria from sending an ultimatum, or Russia from supporting Serbia? I don't see it.

Re: Just Be Rich

#866

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game.

Which we are, because inequality enables advantages in grabbing pieces of various natural monopolies. Land is a prime example; real estate is a zero-sum game (the oblate spheroid we call "Earth" has a finite geographical area, and therefore so does any portion thereof), and rich people are able to play it by "investing" in real estate (read: hoarding land with the understanding that its value will increase perpetually on average due to the fixed supply and population-scaled demand). This is inherently exploitative of anyone lacking such an ability, and inherently results in the transfer of wealth from the working class to the ownership class - both directly (via rent) and indirectly (via opportunity costs).

Re: Just Be Rich

#867

Post by sangnoir » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #198

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

I agree, and would go further and argue that the lives of most middle class is perfectly fine right now. I think the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out. I think there are other more specific things we could worry about, like house prices out of control, nobody is paying to clean up the waste they produce, governments baling out rich people e…

> I think there are other more specific things we could worry about, like house prices out of control, nobody is paying to clean up the waste they produce, governments baling out rich people etc.

> Talking about "inequality" in the abstract is not worthwhile.

I thought the connection between the problems you state and inequality was obvious. I guess it has to be spelt out: inequality means the super-rich become literal rent-seekers by buying houses - not to live in, but for speculative investment purposes - hence current cash-only offers at ridiculous, above-asking prices. They don't care about negative externalities because they want more money now, and there is nothing to act as a check on their desires (since that requires money) so there's a lot of uncleaned waste. Lastly, the government bails them out because they are king-makers and politicians come to kiss the ring during election fundraisers. Elected positions are at risk ever so often during election season, but being wealthy is usually a lifetime "appointment", and wealthy people have more solidarity than politicians - and that's to politicians disadvantage.

Inequality results in power imbalances; the societal problems are second-order effects of the power imbalance. It is not "abstract" to point out that the first-order effect is problematic of, and by itself.

Re: Just Be Rich

#868

Post by systemvoltage » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #866

baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. Which we are, because inequality enables advantages in grabbing pieces of various natural monopolies. Land is a prime example; real estate is a zero-sum game (the oblate spheroid we call "Earth" has a finite geographical area, and therefore so does any portion thereof), and rich people are able to play it by "investing" in real estate (read: hoarding land with th…

It's if you consider X,Y dimensions. Z axis is controlled by law as well so we can't build up to alleviate the congestion in X,Y plane. Furthermore, parking lots and accessibility laws take up a lot of space in cities which take up the free-available X,Y supply.

IMO the biggest problem is Z axis and the infrastructure enabling it (public transportation) for example.

However, since Z axis is stuck, we choose to suburbanize and infinitely expand beyond reasonable sized cities effectively making unlimited supply of real estate. Look at Phoenix and Houston.

So, what you're talking about is real-estate in places like Bay Area and New York cities. Which is not a general argument.

Re: Just Be Rich

#869

Post by abecedarius » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #847

camhart wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a finite amount of "wealth" in the world. You can go out and make wealth every single day. The rich obtaining more of it doesn't mean there's less left over for you and I. People need to be able to cover their needs. Food, housing, healthcare, and I'd be open to arguments in favor of education. But I don't see income inequality as bad necessarily. I see massive amounts of people unable to cover those need…

The proportion is zero-sum by definition, and that's what's important. Even if the pie keeps growing for everyone, the rich are taking a bigger and bigger proportion of the pie, and proportion is what makes you poor. If I have 10% of a $10M the pie today and you have 90%, and tomorrow I have 5% of a $20M pie and you have 95%, then you have proportionally taken from me, and I am worse off, despite having the same abso…

Until roughly 1800, per capita wealth was roughly stagnant. Since then, it's increased roughly 50 times. Maybe more controversially, I'd say we're nowhere near the limits of further development to even greater wealth: technology is a long way from physical limits (e.g. compare biology to human tech), our access to resources has barely begun (e.g. solar power and resources from space).

How do you look at this history and think the right way to approach it is as a fight over who gets what part of an existing pie? That was the standard conceptualization in the beginning! It can't be the key to the 50x change. The recent headwinds against equality have also been a period of relative stagnation in productivity growth. Shouldn't we look really earnestly into how the hell progress happened in the first place?

Yes, we also have a big problem in that poverty should not exist in a society this rich. But this is genuinely a first-world problem. Job 1 is to not screw up what got us here in the first place.

Re: Just Be Rich

#870

Post by eevilspock » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

adriancr wrote: post #588

Barrin92 wrote: post #49

I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources,…

> The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means. Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends. New wealth in…

You had me until "Arrogant new wealth is 100x better"

getting murdered vs getting aggressive cancer